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At Web Summit, ‘Bored Apes’ emerge from swamp but remain murky

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Nicole Muniz stressed the real world utility of the apes, including the Bored & Hungry restaurant chain
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With a blast of “Break on Through” by The Doors and a flashy video of cartoon apes careening around a fantasy landscape, the boss of one of crypto’s most secretive companies took to the stage on Thursday.

Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs, had a tough mission at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon –- to explain what exactly the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” (BAYC) offers the world.

BAYC is a set of 10,000 auto-generated images of cartoon apes sporting various expressions and accessories, with a back story about them living in a swamp.

Enthusiasts have shelled out many millions in trading the images, which come in the form of digital tokens known as NFTs.

Celebrity owners range from Justin Bieber to Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.

But Muniz was keen from the off to sketch out a wider concept of the company, tying it to “web3” –- an imagined future for the internet that has cryptocurrencies at its heart.

“We need to be thinking about how we can help onboard the next 100 million people into web3,” she told the audience.

“That’s really a true mission for us in this company.”

Her wider focus was unsurprising as interest in NFTs has dropped off a cliff.

Trading volumes crashed by 97 percent between January and September, according to Dune Analytics.

Yet Yuga Labs has a notional value of $4 billion and its apes are among only a handful of NFTs that still sell -– one fetched $450,000 last week.

– NFT ‘community’ –

The company has been an enigma since it burst on to the scene last year.

Its founders tried to stay anonymous but BuzzFeed News revealed their identities in February.

The Web Summit was supposed to play host to Muniz and co-founder Greg Solano in one of their most high-profile public appearances.

But he pulled out just a couple of hours before his talk.

“Hey Lisbon Apes, not feeling well at all and need to skip my panel at WebSummit today,” he tweeted.

“Glad I got to meet so many of you last night though.”

Ironically, it was this sense of “community” in the real world that was flagged by Muniz as one of the secrets of BAYC’s success.

“I was talking to an ape last night and they were talking about being at ApeFest,” she said, referring to meet-ups the fans host in New York.

“You’re living and breathing these communities. These people are your friends.”

– ‘Unclear’ licences –

Yet on the face of it, the conceptual framework of Muniz’s pitch is the same as almost every other NFT project.

She talked of community, promised a big new multi-player game and envisaged a world where NFTs would somehow be the keys to a magical online world.

“We have a vision of a future where people can own these assets –- whether they’re NFTs or digital collectibles, whatever you want to call them,” she said.

“You can take them where you want, you can build on them and monetise.”

She claimed BAYC was unique in offering owners full intellectual property rights to do whatever they like with their NFTs and cited the Bored & Hungry restaurant chain, which has an ape on its logo.

But a recent report by the specialist website Galaxy.com said BAYC’s licensing agreement did not give the buyers any IP ownership, describing the terms as “unclear and potentially misleading”.

The authors speculated that high-profile ape-related projects had probably negotiated separate deals.

Muniz said ultimately it was her mission to make it easier for people to understand “web3” and enter its world.

But even the title of her talk — “NFTs, metaverses and the road to Web3 Disney” — was no clearer at the end than it had been at the start.

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California looks to Europe to rein in AI

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Legislators in the California state capitol are working on a flurry of laws aiming to crack down on abusive uses of artificial intelligence on the home turf of some of the world's powerful tech titans
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California, home to Silicon Valley, is eager to rein in the deployment of artificial intelligence and is looking to Europe’s tough-on-big-tech approach for inspiration.

The richest state in the United States by GDP, California is a hotbed of no-holds-barred tech innovation, but lawmakers in state capital Sacramento want to give the industry laws and guardrails it has largely been spared in the internet age.

Brussels has enacted a barrage of laws on US-dominated tech and sprinted to pass the AI Act after OpenAI’s Microsoft-backed ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, unleashing a global AI race.

“What we’re trying to do is actually learn from the Europeans, but also work with the Europeans, and figure out how to put regulations in place on AI,” said David Harris, senior policy advisor at the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy.

As they have in the past with EU laws on private data, lawmakers in California are looking to recent European legislation on AI, especially given the little hope of equivalent national legislation out of Washington.

There are at least 30 different bills proposed by California state legislators that relate to various aspects of AI, according to Harris, who said he has advised officials here and in Europe on such laws.

Proposed laws in California range from requiring AI makers to reveal what was used to train models to banning election ads containing any computer generated features.

“One of the aspects I think is really important is the question of how we deal with deepfakes or fake text created to look like a human being is sending you messages,” Harris told AFP.

State assembly member Gail Pellerin is backing a bill she says would essentially ban the spreading of deceptive digital content created with generative AI in the months leading up to and the weeks following an election.

“Bad actors who are utilizing this are really hoping to create chaos in an election,” Pellerin said.

– Law-breaking ‘bad guys’ –

Industry association NetChoice is dead set against importing aspects of European legislation on AI, or any other EU tech regulation.

“They are taking, essentially, a European approach on artificial intelligence – which is that we must ban the technology,” said Carl Szabo, the general counsel of the association, which advocates for light touch regulation of tech.

“Outlawing AI won’t stop (anything). It’s bad because bad guys don’t follow the law,” Szabo argued.

“That’s what makes them bad guys.”

US computer software giant Adobe, like most tech giants, worked with Europe on the AI Act, according to Adobe General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer Dana Rao.

At the heart of the EU AI Act is a risk-based approach, with AI practices deemed more risky getting more scrutiny.

“We feel good about where the AI Act ended up” with its high-risk, low-risk approach, said Rao.

Already, Adobe engineers carry out “impact assessments” to rate risk before making AI products available, according to Rao.

“You want to think about nuclear safety, about cybersecurity, about when AI is making substantial decisions over human rights,” Rao said.

– ‘Watching California’ –

In California, Rao said he expected the problem of deepfakes to be the first to fall under the authority of a new law.

Assembly Bill 602 would criminalize non-consensual deepfake pornography while Assembly Bill 730 bans the use of AI deepfakes during election campaign season.

To fight this, Adobe joined other companies to create “content credentials” that Rao equated to a “nutrition label” for digital content.

Assemblywoman Pellerin expects AI laws adopted in California to be replicated in other states.

“People are watching California,” Pellerin said, with a slew of US states also working on their own AI deepfake bills.

“We’re all in this together; we have to stay ahead of the folks that are trying to wreak havoc in an election,” she said.

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Big tech told to identify AI deepfakes ahead of EU vote

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EU parliamentary elections are taking place in the bloc's 27 member states on June 6-9
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The EU called on Facebook, TikTok and other tech titans on Tuesday to crack down on deepfakes and other AI-generated content by using clear labels ahead of Europe-wide polls in June.

The recommendation is part of a raft of guidelines published under a landmark content law by the European Commission for digital giants to tackle risks to elections including disinformation.

The EU executive has unleashed a string of measures to clamp down on big tech, especially regarding content moderation.

Its biggest tool is the Digital Services Act (DSA) under which the bloc has designated 22 digital platforms as “very large” including Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and X.

There has been feverish excitement over artificial intelligence since OpenAI’s ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, but the EU’s concerns over the technology’s harms have grown in parallel.

Brussels especially fears the impact of Russian “manipulation” and “disinformation” on elections taking place in the bloc’s 27 member states on June 6-9.

In the new guidelines, the commission said the largest platforms “should assess and mitigate specific risks linked to AI, for example by clearly labelling content generated by AI (such as deepfakes)”.

The commission recommends that big platforms promote official information on elections and “reduce the monetisation and virality of content that threatens the integrity of electoral processes” to diminish any risks.

“With today’s guidelines we are making full use of all the tools offered by the DSA to ensure platforms comply with their obligations and are not misused to manipulate our elections, while safeguarding freedom of expression,” said the EU’s top tech enforcer, Thierry Breton.

While the guidelines are not legally binding, platforms must explain what other “equally effective” measures they are taking to limit the risks if they do not adhere to them.

The EU can ask for more information and if regulators do not believe there is full compliance, they can hit the firms with probes that could lead to hefty fines.

– ‘Trusted’ information –

Under the new guidelines, the commission also said political advertising “should be clearly labelled as such” before a tougher law on the issue comes into force in 2025.

It also urges platforms to put in place mechanisms “to reduce the impact of incidents that could have a significant effect on the election outcome or turnout”.

The EU will conduct “stress-tests” with relevant platforms in late April, it said.

X has already been under investigation since December over content moderation.

And the commission on March 14 pressed Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and four other platforms to provide more information on how they are countering AI risks to polls.

In the past few weeks, several of the companies including Meta have outlined their plans.

TikTok on Tuesday announced more of the measures it was taking including push notifications from April that will direct users to find more “trusted and authoritative” information about the June vote.

TikTok has around 142 million monthly active users in the EU — and is increasingly used as a source of political information among young people.

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Ousted WeWork co-founder bids to buy company: reports

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The pandemic exacerbated WeWork's woes as people avoided offices for fear of Covid-19
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Ousted WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann recently bid more than $500 million to buy back the struggling office-sharing group, according to media reports Monday.

Neumann recently submitted the offer, but it was not clear how he would finance such a deal, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC reported, citing sources close to the matter.

Neumann is seeking to buy the company out of bankruptcy, according to a letter to WeWork seen by AFP last month.

WeWork went into bankruptcy in November with its major creditors set to take control of the company.

At its height, WeWork was the biggest private renter of office space in Manhattan, with co-working spaces in cities across the globe.

But investors became concerned not only about WeWork’s business model and unbridled growth, but also about Neumann’s reliability as a boss.

A charismatic figure, Neumann was known for his sometimes abrupt decisions.

In September 2019, the Board of Directors dismissed him, shortly after the company’s stock market debut was postponed. 

Neumann was forced out of the company with a $1.7 billion exit package, while the company’s value was slashed to $8 billion.

WeWork was then disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which emptied offices as workers went remote, and the company never fully recovered.

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